‘Valerie and Her Week of Wonders’

A nubile 12-year-old dodges a town full of vampires: made in the traumatized aftermath of the Prague Spring, Jaromil Jireš’s phantasmagoric Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) is one of the strangest movies ever made in Eastern Europe—so unrelenting in its perverse symbolism that it was original released in the US as a midnight movie, the Czech El Topo.